License This! Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo by Amagi Seimaru & others

Let’s just pretend I posted something in January. I certainly meant to! (I had a moment of panic just now thinking I wouldn’t even be able to get one in for February, since the site was down for me for a bit and tomorrow I won’t be home from work before the month’s over in Melinda’s timezone, but I made it!)

This month’s request is actually a license rescue. I’m not sure if that makes it more or less likely than something that’s never been licensed before, but it does seem that quite a few things are being picked up for a second go-round, so I refuse to give up hope!

Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo, aka The Case Files of Young Kindaichi, aka The Kindaichi Case Files, is one of my very favorite manga of all time, possibly even my number one favorite. Last year saw its twentieth anniversary, and though I haven’t been reading it since the very beginning, it has been a very long time since I first fell in love with the series. (It’s weird to think that if Kindaichi actually aged, he would now be in his mid-thirties like me, rather than an eternal teenager!)

I can see why it would be a daunting project to tackle. The first series, consisting of twenty-seven volumes (with a total of nineteen cases awkwardly divided between the volumes), ran from 1992 to 1997 and was followed immediately by the second series, which consisted of ten volumes (seven cases, all either single or double-volume stories, which eliminated the problem of getting to the end of the book and finding yourself left hanging in the middle of a mystery) and ran until 2001. That was supposed to be the end of it, but (thankfully!) it ended up restarting in 2004 with what has been referred to as simply “the new series.” This series was also released with one case per volume (or divided into two volumes for some of the longer ones) and resulted in nine cases spread over fourteen volumes. Then in 2012 the formerly “new series” was rebranded as the 20th Anniversary Series, with three volumes having been released in that line so far with a fourth due in March (and annoyingly, they’ve gone back to the same format as the original series, rather than the more superior “one case per volume” format of the second and third series).

So that’s a total of fifty-four volumes (or thirty-seven cases) just in the main series, and it’s still on-going! Not to mention there are also six volumes of short stories and two volumes featuring Police Superintendent Akechi. And if you really want to be thorough, there are nine novels as well. (It’s also spawned four different drama series (the most recent of which just started airing a few weeks ago), as well as an anime.) That’s a lot of material to work with.

One thing I really like about Kindaichi (aside from the fact that they’re just good mysteries) is that people never kill for money or jealousy or petty stuff like that. It’s always revenge. Inevitably when Kindaichi reveals the killer, the killer will launch into a sob story about how the people they murdered wronged them (often those who were murdered turn out to be murderers themselves), and I’m not going to lie, I eat that sort of thing up with a spoon. Hearing the killer tell their story is probably my favorite part of the cases, though the reveal as to how they pulled it off comes a close second.

The first eighteen volumes were released by TokyoPop, but the series was dropped long before they went out of business. If it was dropped due to low sales, maybe another company would be hesitant to pick it up, but in that case a digital-only release might be the way to go. The translation and editing still requires some investment, but it’s not as risky as traditional publishing.

You might be wondering why we need another mystery series when there’s already Detective Conan, but apart from the fact that there can never be enough mysteries, Conan and Kindaichi are different types of series. Although both are murder mysteries, Kindaichi is much more realistic (well, as realistic as you can get when you’re talking about a high school boy who stumbles across murders wherever he goes) and serious compared to the Inspector Gadget-y hijinks of Conan.

Both for people who love Conan and are looking for more mystery manga, and those who want something different, Kindaichi is a good choice, and I hope that eventually it becomes available to more people.

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About Travis Anderson

Travis Anderson has been reading manga for almost twenty years, starting with the tragically small selection available in English in the early '90s (Ranma 1/2!Oh My Goddess!) before discovering the wider world of Japanese-language manga and never looking back. Despite not reading manga in English himself, he wishes all his favorites would be released in English so more people could enjoy them.

I suspect that’s the case, because Amazon has no release date for that ISBN, and the Diamond release lists don’t include any Kindaichi volume for November 2008. Unfortunately, since it was supposed to conclude the case begun in the last published volume.

I would love to see Kindaichi back in print. I seem to recall it was on an infrequent release schedule before it disappeared, which probably indicates it didn’t sell well, but it’s also a Kodansha title, so TOKYOPOP likely lost it when they lost all the others.

Yeah, it looks like it was being released fairly often at first but then slowed to two volumes a year for a few years. (Though if they’re publishing complete cases in the volumes, as I think they were, then at least a long wait isn’t too bad, since they are complete stories.)

While I like Detective Conan, I think the flipping back and forth between the run of the mill mystery and the overarching mystery about the Black Organization is a bit of a distraction. It feels like we’re being strung along for way too long.

I loved Kindaichi because it was a straight mystery with the occasional bit of funny hijinks sprinkled in. I would be very happy if this got picked up again. And the solutions usually made sense to me. Conan occasionally is so complex that I don’t even bother to think about whether it’s a logical solution or not because sometimes it doesn’t.

Yeah, the split attention of Conan detracts from my enjoyment as well. I would prefer it without the overarching plot (especially since, you said, at this point, it feels like it’s just being drawn out on purpose, which of course it is).

I like Kindaichi but I just have to prefer Conan for much more variety… Sometimes the volumes for Kindaichi are just too long for their own good
Also the settings never change even though there are multiple people making the 1 series, that’s no good